The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Read online

  I clasped my hands together under my knee and swung my leg off the bed as if it were an inanimate object.

  Then I looked up to see Sharice crying and thought, What an idiot I am. She’s just done something incredibly difficult and courageous, and I’m acting the clown.

  But she wasn’t crying. Well, maybe a little. But mostly she was laughing. And she came around the bed and put her arms around me. We stayed in that embrace for several minutes. I didn’t speak, because I was relieved that she hadn’t been offended by my reaction, and I didn’t want to press my luck.

  “Will you stay with me tonight? I don’t want to have sex. I just want you to hold me.”

  I pushed her away and smiled at her. “Is this a test of my willpower?”

  “No. When it comes to me, I hope you have no willpower at all. It’s just that I have a lot of things to deal with, and I have to do it one at a time.”

  “So should I go home and get those toothbrushes?”

  “I’m a dental hygienist, silly. I have a whole box full of new ones.”

  Even though Sharice has seen more of the inside of my mouth than I have, it felt strange to be brushing, flossing and gargling with her. At least she didn’t have that blue lab coat on. In fact, the only thing either of us had on at that point was underpants.

  She took hers off before sliding under the covers. I took that as an invitation to follow suit.

  After a long kiss, she said good night and rolled over onto her right side, a good move on her part because her wish that I have no willpower was coming true.

  My right arm was under her neck, my right hand clasping hers. She found my left hand and placed it over her scar. I embraced her from behind, gently massaging the scar, hoping to palpate away any bad memories that might remain in her warm, lithe body.

  We tossed and turned a bit but continued to snuggle because the windows were open and it was freezing cold.

  At one point during the night, she felt my hands on her chest again and said, “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “No. I always sleep with the windows open.”

  She gave me a playful jab. “You know what I mean.”

  “The first time I saw you in Dr. Batres’s office, you were so striking that I tried to picture you without any clothes on.”

  “Men.”

  “Yeah, we’re all animals. When you dropped your dress tonight, the reality was a lot better than my imagination.”

  “Except in your imagination, you probably pictured me with two breasts.”

  “Neither of which was as cute as the one I’m touching now.”

  “But the left—”

  “This is just a wild guess, but I’m going to say it was just like the right one. So reality is still better than imagination.”

  She kissed me, then turned and nodded off. After I lifted the covers on my side to let in some much-needed cold air, I finally did the same.

  8

  When I awoke the next morning, she was propped on her pillow smiling at me. “You’re a sound sleeper.”

  I stretched while acknowledging as much. “How did you sleep?”

  “Pretty good, considering your pesky little friend kept poking at me.”

  I felt my face glow red. “Sorry. I tried to think pure thoughts. I guess you have to go to work now.”

  “No. This is one of my ten-to-seven days. I planned a special breakfast for us.”

  “So you knew all along I’d be spending the night?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t turn me down.”

  She called the breakfast salmon Benedict. It was smoked salmon topped with a poached egg over a toasted English muffin slathered in béarnaise sauce dotted with capers, about as far from my traditional desayuno of huevos rancheros as Montreal is from Albuquerque. But it went just as well with the leftover Gruet.

  After breakfast, she roasted green coffee beans. I was surprised it took only five minutes in her special roaster. The aroma was so good that grinding and brewing seemed almost superfluous. Until she foamed some milk and gave me the best cappuccino I’ve ever tasted. I’ve never been a fan of fancy coffees, but I knew I could get hooked on Sharice’s cappuccino.

  She sat her empty cup down and said, “I’m going to tell you about my mastectomy.”

  “This is one of those things you need to do one at a time?”

  “Yes. The second one. It will be a lot easier than the first one. After I tell you, we are never to speak of it again.”

  I nodded.

  She looked me in the eyes. “The worst part wasn’t the cancer. The worst part wasn’t losing a breast. The worst part was the treatment. Everyone has side effects from chemotherapy. A lucky few have mild reactions. For most people, it’s agony. For a small number of us, it goes beyond agony. I had a severe reaction to a drug called docetaxel. It sent me to the ER and then to the ICU for a week. It was so bad that I was disappointed I survived. They tried a lower dose the second time, but the result was just as bad. In addition to diarrhea, vomiting, trouble breathing, and throat swelling, my lips and mouth were so covered with sores that it was too painful to brush my teeth.”

  Her stare softened into a grin. “That was the worst part.”

  While we drank a second cappuccino, she told me about the rest of her grueling ordeal and how her bout with breast cancer brought her to Albuquerque.

  She left for work. I volunteered to stay and do the dishes. Then I walked home singing “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  9

  The first person through my door looked like the black version of that Mr. Clean guy pictured on the label of my kitchen cleaner. Except he didn’t have an earring and was wearing a suit so perfectly tailored that you couldn’t see the pistol holstered under the lapel.

  It was Charles Webbe, the FBI agent who saved my life when the owner of the Austrian restaurant I worked in tried to murder me. I don’t understand why the owner tried to kill me; all he had to do was wait for the food to do that.

  “Heard you were involved in a racial incident,” Charles said.

  “The FBI is keeping tabs on me?”

  “You think the CIA are the only ones who spy on ordinary citizens?” He laughed and then said, “The bartender at Blackbird Buvette is a friend. He told me James Mintars was hassling you and Miss Clarke.”

  “Is Mintars a big black guy?”

  “Yes. And well known to the local police.”

  “So why should the FBI be involved?”

  “The Bureau isn’t involved. But if you want me to, I can have an informal talk with him.” He smiled and added, “Brother to brother—make sure he doesn’t bother you again.”

  Despite having a waistline no larger than mine, Agent Webbe is six-three and 225 pounds of muscle. A talk with him would put even Vladimir Putin on the straight and narrow.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you need to do that. Sharice put him in his place—told him he had a face that could blow the cover off a manhole.”

  “Une tête à faire sauter les plaques d’égouts,” he said.

  “You speak French?”

  He nodded. “Russian too.”

  Maybe sending him for a talk with Putin was a better idea than I’d realized.

  I brewed some New Mexico Piñon Coffee while we talked. I save the good stuff for people like Charles, who appreciate it.

  When I handed him a cup, he commented on my remembering that he takes it without cream or sugar.

  “How could I forget? When I first asked you how you took your coffee, you said, ‘Black—like your girlfriend.’”

  “I was just hassling you because you lied to me about having a black girlfriend.”

  “I do have a black girlfriend.”

  “You do now. You didn’t then. Got any of those cuernos de azucar you fed me the last time I was here?”

>   “No, but I have some fresh buñuelos.”

  Buñuelos fly apart like clay pigeons when you bite into them, but Charles ate two without a single speck of the crisp fried dough showing on his dark-blue suit or starched white shirt.

  The motto of the FBI is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Maybe they should add Neatness.

  “I’m happy you’re not worried about Mintars,” he said, “but there will be others. This is what happens when a white guy has a black girlfriend.”

  “I don’t think of Sharice as black.”

  “You got a vision problem?”

  “What I mean is I don’t think of her as my ‘black girlfriend.’ That sounds like a phrase to distinguish her from my white one or my brown one. I have only one girlfriend. She just happens to be black. Just like I don’t think of you as a black FBI agent. You’re an agent who happens to be black. And I don’t think of myself as a white treasure hunter. I’m a treasure hunter who happens to be white.”

  “You’re not a treasure hunter of any color. You’re a pot thief.”

  “You going to arrest me for that?” I asked with a smile.

  “I’ll leave that to the BLM.” He put his empty cup on the counter. “Thanks for the coffee. I liked it.”

  He turned back after opening the door. “Your idealism is sappy, but I like it too.”

  After Charles left, my optimistic side hoped for a customer. My realistic side didn’t share that hope, so I hung up my BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES sign and walked to Treasure House Books and Gifts on the south side of the Plaza. I counted five O’Keeffe posters along the way, as well as maybe a dozen of her flowers and bleached skulls adorning everything from calendars to T-shirts.

  I suppose it was one of those cases of noticing things already on your mind, in this case the worn canvas Susannah thought was an O’Keeffe.

  I bought three books, one by her, one about her and one with pictures of her New Mexico paintings.

  Looking at those paintings made me think O’Keeffe liked New Mexico for the same reasons I do, but Susanna tells me you can’t tell much about artists by looking at their work. For all we know, Andy Warhol never sipped a single spoon of Campbell’s soup.

  I wondered if she’d ever been in Old Town. Maybe even in my building before I owned it.

  I wondered if she thought of Alfred Stieglitz as her Jewish husband or Juan Hamilton as her Hispanic boyfriend.

  10

  She gave me one of her looks. “Consummate? It sounds like a soup.”

  I had closed the shop with the inventory intact, alas, and had just told Susannah that although Sharice and I slept together, we didn’t consummate our relationship. “It means—”

  “I know what it means, Hubert. People don’t use that word these days. What I don’t understand is how you two slept together in the nude and didn’t have sex.”

  “I thought pure thoughts.”

  “Right. Given what she said about your ‘pesky little friend,’ he evidently didn’t get the no-sex-tonight memo.”

  Susannah loves pushing me over my embarrassment threshold, an easy task considering it’s no higher than the salt rim on my margarita. Actually, the salt was gone and so was the margarita. I managed to run out of both simultaneously. No mean feat, considering I’d been talking about my date with Sharice rather than gauging the diminution of my drink.

  She saw I had finished and signaled Angie for a second round. “Just last week we were trying to figure out her deep dark secret, although you weren’t much help.”

  “At least I came up with three theories. You’re the one who insisted we talk about it, and you didn’t contribute anything.”

  “Your three theories were that she’s a virgin, she’s from Canada and she’s thinking about becoming a nun. Compared to that, my nothing looks good. We should have kept at it. I think I would have figured it out.”

  “You would have guessed she had a mastectomy?”

  She gave a little shudder. “Maybe not that specifically. But if a girl is hesitant about having sex even with a guy she really likes, one reason might be that she has a problem with her body.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. A hairy back? A tattoo of a walrus on her tummy? The point is it wasn’t the sex per se—it was the getting naked part.”

  “That was my favorite part.”

  “Of course it was. You’ve been dying to see her in the altogether.” She was silent for a moment. “It doesn’t bother you at all?”

  “How could getting undressed with Sharice bother me? Well, it bothered me in the sense that we didn’t—”

  “Yeah. Pesky. What I mean is doesn’t it bother you that she …”

  She didn’t know how to finish that sentence and neither did I. If there’s a politically correct way of saying she no longer has a left breast that makes you feel less uncomfortable, I don’t know what it is.

  “No, it doesn’t bother me. I was so surprised at how small the scar was that I didn’t think about what had been there.” I hesitated. “I’m tempted to say something, but it might be oinky.”

  “That’s never stopped you in the past.”

  “Okay, I’ll just say it. I already knew she was flat-chested. I thought it went well with her thin, long limbs and petite features. You had a word for that look, but I don’t remember it.”

  “Gamine.”

  “Jeez, another francophone.”

  “That’s like a bassoon, right?”

  Sometimes I don’t know if she’s kidding. “So because she had small breasts to begin with, the operation didn’t leave her looking lopsided.”

  She stared at me for a few moments. “I’m not sure if that’s oinky or not.”

  “Whew. Anyway, I’m glad she showed me instead of telling me.”

  “Well, of course you are. You got to see her naked.”

  “Which was great, but that’s not my point. My point is that if she’d told me, my imagination would have conjured up some horrible purply, bumpy disfiguration. But seeing it with no warning meant I hadn’t mentally prepared for it. When she turned around, I just saw a scar. Actually, I just glanced at it. There was a lot of new and exciting scenery, so I didn’t let my eyes stay in one place too long.”

  “Do you think that’s why she didn’t have reconstructive surgery?”

  “No. She didn’t have reconstructive surgery because she couldn’t afford it.”

  “But she’s from Canada. Isn’t health care free up there?”

  “My econ professor always reminded us there is no free lunch.”

  “Yeah, I know. It isn’t free because they pay taxes for it. But pooling money together to cover health care makes sense.”

  “It does. But wouldn’t it be better if it was pooled voluntarily rather than taxing Canadians who might want to spend their money on something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Hockey sticks and mukluks? Did I mention that Sharice roasts and grinds beans every time she makes coffee?”

  “Twice.”

  “I guess I was impressed. Anyway, she told me the whole story while we were drinking the world’s best cappuccino. She was in dental school when she found the lump. She suffered extreme side effects from the drug they gave her. The good news is she’s been cancer-free for years. When the treatments ended, she wanted to consider reconstructive surgery, but there are very few cosmetic surgeons in Canada.”

  “Reconstructive breast surgery is not cosmetic, Hubert. It’s not a facelift. For lots of women who’ve had a mastectomy, it reduces depression and raises self-esteem.” She took a sip of her saltless margarita. “Jeez, I sound like a brochure from the Susan Komen Foundation.”

  I have no opinion on reconstructive breast surgery. Which is probably a good thing, because I don’t think I have a right to an opinion on the subject.


  “Reconstructive breast surgery may not be cosmetic,” I pointed out, “but it’s performed by cosmetic surgeons, and there are very few of them up there because the goal of the Canadian socialized medicine program is to keep people healthy, not make them look good.”

  She sighed. “I don’t think they call it socialized medicine anymore.”

  “Whatever it’s called, it doesn’t cover facelifts and tummy tucks, so that discourages doctors from pursuing the cosmetic surgery specialty. The result is that she faced a wait maybe as long as five years. She decided to do what many other Canadian women do—come to the US and pay for it. But she didn’t have the money. So she decided to enter dental hygiene training because it takes a lot less time and money than going back to dental school. Her plan was to move to the States and make enough money as a dental hygienist to pay for a special operation that takes flesh from her butt and uses it to create a new breast.”

  “Sheesh. It’s not called taking flesh from her butt and using it to create a new breast. It’s called autonomous breast reconstruction.”

  “And you know about this because?”

  “I volunteered at the Walk for the Cure and filled the time between registering walkers by reading brochures. It was interesting in a sort of morbid way.”

  “Well, it’s not autonomous—it’s autological. I remember because Sharice loves word games.”

  “Autological is a game like Scrabble?”

  “I don’t know if there’s a commercial board game, but the way Sharice taught me is one person names a letter and the other person has to think of an autological word starting with that letter. Then you switch, and the first person to be stumped loses.”

  “What’s an autological word?”

  “One that describes itself. Like noun or short.”

  “Because noun is a noun and short is a short word?”

  “Exactly. Want to try a round?”